Instead of writing a review of the newly arrived Transcend 600x CompactFlash cards, we decided to somehow give you an inside of one story that actually came out of nowhere while we tested the cards – if you are photographer, and especially no-US based, you are almost meant to have a notebook instead of regular desktop computer. Or at least you are if you want to save countless minutes copying your files from your camera’s CompactFlash card because of the slow speed of USB card readers out there.

Lets begin with a big “No” – you will do much better job working on a regular computer in terms of speed of postprocessing, although the modern notebooks are good enough for editing photos, except the fact you shuld probably use them with external and calibrated monitor to avoid laptop screens, which suck big time today, no matter how good the notebook itself. Proble is that as photographer you are tied to the speed of your CompactFlash card and, apparently – to your card reader’s performance.

The first applies to the speeds your camera is able to achieve while writing to the card. Which are fairly low, actually. Rob Galbraight made some really extensive benchmarks here and it’s obvious that Canon’s 5D mark II is capable to achieve like 45 MB/s write speed on a proper CF card. In his review he managed to squeeze around 29 MB/s with Nikon’s D300 while writing on Transcend’s 600x Compact Flash card, which is actually a lot more than we could do with ours (ours wrote like 14.5~15.5 MB/s no matter if we completely excluded the compression and processing out of the test using only uncompressed RAW). Our conclusion before we stumbled onto Rob’s review was that both the 8 GB and 16 GB versions of Transcend’s memory card were enough to either shoot one 12-bit compressed NEF + Fine JPEG every second without ever worrying about the speed, or you can do series of Normal JPEG with almost no gap between buffer output and the speed you fill it. We could do almost the same speed with Verbatim’s not very uncommon 300x CF card anyway, and it’s much cheaper than the 8 GB 600x card Transcend made (not to mention how much cheaper it is compared to any of those rated as “for professional photographers” cards SanDisk and PhotoFast make, shame on them). It turns that you are really dependable on your card if you want high speeds, which means you should really buy one of PhotoFast or SanDisk cards that did better in Rob’s tests, no matter the cost.

Now the second stage is to copy your photos on your harddrive. Which sometimes turns to be slower than your card if you are using your notebook and good ExpressCard reader, but it’s also slower even compared to your camera if you have a USB reader like 90% of the people do. The only (two) other solution(s) available is either use IDE/SATA adapter in your desktop PC – which makes no sense and it looks more like a DIY workaround, or use FireWire adapter, which are not very common indeed, plus you’ll need FireWire 800 port and a compatible card reader, as the 400 Mbits readers won’t do much more work than a regular USB reader.

We wonder – is there some huge mysterious conspiracy of notebook manufacturers or what? Why we couldn’t find solutions other than USB or FireWire adapters? Our desktop PCs are much more suited for our needs as photographers, but there is no common solution as those CompactFlash-to-SATA adapters that you will find as regular accessory in every PC shop, while ExpressCard Compact Flash readers are fairly common, and every photographer who has a notebook will eventually have one of these.

How twisted is to advertise those fast Compact Flash cards without ever mentioning the fact you need ExpressCard reader to get the most out of them as photographer?

3/10, as you’ll probably find such cards very useful in everyday use, although you’ll regret that you cannot read them through the missing Express Card reader on your PC.

Tags: Compact Flash, Nikon D300 UDMA speed, professional photography, Transcend

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